Essays on educational equity

School districts with high concentrations of minorities have lower levels of funding, achievement levels, and graduation rates, on average, than districts with low concentrations of minorities; the same pattern persists when comparing high- and low-poverty districts. Therefore, policy makers, practitioners, and parents are interested in equalizing educational opportunities and outcomes.;In the first chapter, I document inequities in school funding across and within states and then examine one increasingly prevalent strategy for equalizing school funding: court-mandated reform. I separately measure the effects of equity and adequacy court rulings and their effects on between- and within-state inequality. I find that court-mandated reform has decreased inequality, mainly driven by a decrease in between-state inequality.;Although the effects of the courts have been studied, the effects of the legislature have largely been ignored in the literature. In the second chapter, I measure the effects of the racial composition of the legislature on state aid to school districts. Because racial composition is not randomly assigned, I use an instrumental variables approach by exploiting an exogenous shock to minority representation because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Using a panel of district-level data, I find that increased black representation leads to increased levels of state aid; I also find that the largest increases are in districts with the highest concentrations of black residents.;I then estimate the effect of a black legislator on state aid to her own district using a regression discontinuity design. These results show that black legislators secure about twice as much state aid for their own districts compared to the amount of state aid they secure for the average district in the state.;The third chapter switches the focus from equity in funding to equity in educational outcomes. My co-author, Michael Gottfried, and I examine variance in student achievement in the Philadelphia School District. After controlling for a rich set of covariates, the largest piece of variance still unexplained is at the student level. Our findings show that family characteristics---outside the role of the school---may play a large, if not the most predominant, role in student achievement.